


The War Outside Our Door Keeps Raging

by thescrewtapedemos



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - No Sburb Session, Alternate Universe - Zombies, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-18
Updated: 2012-11-20
Packaged: 2017-11-18 23:12:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/566322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thescrewtapedemos/pseuds/thescrewtapedemos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The news barks at him every time he turns the television on. The media is scrambling, inexplicable deaths and human-shaped bite-marks. There's shaky footage. A man in Florida tearing off another man's face, not dying until one brave cop nails him between the eyes. </p><p>Dave stops turning the television on, after politicians stop dismissing the claims and start avoiding cameras, faces gray and pinched.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title and opening quote from the song Safe and Sound by Taylor Swift
> 
> Chapter title from the song Girl In the War by Josh Ritter

  
_Don't you dare look out your window, darling,_   
_Everything's on fire_   
_The war outside our door keeps raging on_   
_Hold on to this lullaby_   
_Even when the music's gone_

+8+

It's getting more tense every day.

The news barks at him every time he turns the television on. The media is scrambling, inexplicable deaths and human-shaped bite-marks. There's shaky footage. A man in Florida tearing off another man's face, not dying until one brave cop nails him between the eyes.

Dave stops turning the television on, after politicians stop dismissing the claims and start avoiding cameras, faces gray and pinched.

He leaves the apartment once in a while – it's empty, always empty, fucking Bro disappearing at the worst of times – and walks around town. The stores are closed for the most part; the ones that are open are empty of customers when he comes in to buy his juice. Most homes are abandoned or locked tight, fearful eyes looking through the curtains. A lot of people have skipped town.

School has been canceled indefinitely.

The wind smells sour and hot when it bothers to blow. The trees rustle all the time. Dave pretends the sword strapped to his back is a toy.

He turns the radio on and the only two stations not static and dead are the governmental broadcast system – _this is an automated warning, you are advised not to leave your homes, this has been an automated warning_ \- and a single determined DJ playing a Top 40's list that hasn't updated in weeks. Ryan Seacrest hasn't been heard from in... a long while.

+8+

“We're leaving, and we have space for you.” Mrs. Paint's face has always been made for smiling, happy and fat and just like a mother's face should look.

“Thanks, but no,” Dave says, leaning against the door. He is the fucking picture of nonchalance, thank you _very_ much.

Mrs. Paint looks tired, her happy moon-face creased with tiredness and worry. Her husband and his perpetual rage lean over her shoulder. Dave stares back into Spade's glower impassively.

“Please, Dave.” She sounds exhausted. “You don't need to wait for your brother, it isn't safe.”

_Nowhere's safe anymore_ , he wants to say, _you're running like cattle and they'll_ kill _you like cattle_. He doesn't say it because he's scared out of his mind and the terror is filling him like a balloon but he isn't cruel.

“I'll be fine,” he says with a grin instead. Mrs. Paint lays a hand on his cheek for a moment and stares at him wordlessly. He lets her do it because he needs this human contact more than he'll admit to, but he's glad when she lets go.

“Stay safe, Dave,” she says. He shrugs and closes the door on the idea of her getting into her minivan, kids in tow, shotgun in her husband's lap.

+8+

Rose calls him a few days later. Dave's stopped paying so much attention to the date, with no school to keep him synchronized to any calendar. The days keep slipping by in a haze of not panicking, sitting at the table and drinking apple juice mechanically.

“They're evacuating all military personnel and their families,” is what she opens with. He drops the phone and watches it hit the ground. Rose and her brilliant scientist mother, building better bombs, better guns, better helmets and armor.

He breaks into a liquor store, knows the owner has left town. The abandoned houses are starting to outnumber the ones locked up tight.

+8+

“Rose, Rose, Rosey-posey, makes all the boys go whoa-sie.”

“Dave, you're drunk.”

“No shit, princess.”

Rose pats him on the shoulder and hauls him inside. He thanks her profusely, or maybe the words don't come out and he just paws her arm until she sits him down. It doesn't matter.

“Dave, _why_ are you drunk?”

“With wine, with poetry, or with virtue as you please,” Dave quotes, and Rose raises an eyebrow.

“Of course your coherency only emerges for the recitation of poetry.” She sounds drier than a desert and Dave always kinda liked that heat.

“Ain't no other way to be,” he hums, touching her cheek. She smiles and it's just like her, small and sharp and beautiful.

There's a long pause of television – something mindless and _thank god_ not the news – in the background and the room spinning pleasantly.

“Dave, why are you drunk _here_?”

“Ah, Rosey, you knowing me so well and all.” Dave grins his most disarming smile, the one Rose sees right through like it wasn't no thing. “Got to send you off proper, baby.”

Her mouth tightens up into sadness and oh, no, that wasn't what he meant to do at all.

“Feelings are not your art, Dave.” She sits straight-backed like a Victorian lady and it fools everyone but him, to him she's like glass.

“Don’t lie to me, sweetheart,” he whispers, touching her cheek again. “Don't lie to me too.”

“Dave...”

“Awww shut up, I’m drunk as hell. Don’t know a word I‘m saying.” He smiles his big smile again and Rose relaxes and everything’s right again.

“Do you hafta go?” he asks plaintively when the commercials have come and gone at least twice in the corners of his vision. Her fingers stop their repetitive combing of his hair. She is an ice-statue again, and the only thought he can catch a hold of is that it's a crying, crying shame.

“It's doubtful that I will get a choice.” Her voice is like daddy long-legs, skittering over cement. Too easy to crush.

He's missing things, the world is skipping and he's so tired it's like his insides are filling with lead. He hasn't slept well these past few weeks. He keeps thinking someone's knocking on the door.

He falls asleep on the couch with Rose's hand in his hair because he doesn't get a choice, but he would think _I chose this anyway_ , if he could think.

+8+

The big truck rumbles up outside Rose's house and Dave thinks that the military videos he used to watch didn't really show the _smell_ of hot cloth and stinking human and gun-oil. It's a troop-carrier, too functional and inhuman for his Rose.

The soldiers eye him warily like he's going to try to sneak aboard. He won't.

Rose hugs him when her mother goes to talk with the captain. He brushes a kiss against her ear and she makes a sound like her throat’s tearing. She's shaking in his arms.

“It'll be okay, baby girl.” He smiles his biggest, happiest smile for her. Her face is impassive when it comes away from his shoulder, but her eyes are red and her cheeks are wet and her breath hitches.

“It's time to go, Rose.” Rose's mother puts a hand on her shoulder. “I'm sorry, David.”

She sounds sincere, which is nice of her.

“Keep Rose safe,” he demands and she nods.

They climb into the truck and Dave stays well back from the guns. The soldiers look more wary than ever, watching the trees and the spaces between the houses and the houses themselves. When they drive away he waves and waves even after they turn the corner and can't see him. His arm moves back and forth mechanically.

_There are guns in our house_ , Rose had whispered fiercely in his ear. _You better be alive when I come back for you._

All the houses up and down the street are abandoned, but he feels inquisitive eyes on his skin all the same, between the curtains.

+8+

He takes the guns and the ammo and the nonperishable food. He heads home, to the top-floor apartment. It's empty still – goddammit Bro – but it's home. It keeps the terror tamped down in his chest.

He runs out of apple juice. He runs out of milk but fuck it, his bones are plenty strong enough. He runs out of bread and then his power cuts out and he eats everything in the fridge. 

He doesn't open his door; he doesn't look out his windows. He doesn't leave the apartment, not even for the distant gunshots, not even when the street beneath his window echoes with screaming. They all fade away eventually, after a week or so, and he would never admit it but there was some comfort in the sounds. He thinks _there is no one left now_ and then tries not to think for a while.

He still doesn't sleep well. He still dreams that someone's knocking on the door.

+8+

He finally runs out of the last can of shitty pre-cooked pasta-in-a-can.

It's been weeks and Bro still isn't home. Rose still hasn't come.

Dave leaves the apartment in the middle of the night, because he can move really fucking quietly and he doesn't want to be found. He doesn't know quite what, if anything, is out there but he's finally able to admit in the face of starvation that he's scared. He's scared shitless.

The stairwell is empty and pitch-black and echoing. He stops at each door on each landing and listens. It's dead silent on every one, and he's not sure if he's relieved.

The streets smell sour even with no wind blowing, and one of the houses a street over has burned to the ground. Dave pokes in the ashes a little, turns over melted silverware and charred stubs of furniture. He keeps an eye on the trees and the spaces between the houses.

Nothing moves, and everything is quiet. Dave walks in the shadows, which is easier when there are no streetlights.

The shopping district is a mess of tattered paper, broken windows, and the smell is worse than ever. There are...

Dave stops to puke in the gutter. It's been weeks since the looting, but apparently no one had bothered to clear away the bodies. There aren't so many but the remains look like they've been chewed on and there are maggots squirming in the faint moonlight, loathsome fat little worms.

He steps around them with as much space as possible and goes into the first store.

Inside the smell has been trapped and multiplied until Dave has to breathe through his mouth to keep from puking again. The fridges at the back are a mass of fuzzy mold, but there are still cans on the shelves. Dave packs them into his backpack, wraps them in a jacket so they don't clink together.

He leaves as fast as he can because he can't shake the feeling there's something moving between the shelves. There isn't, he checked with sword drawn and shaking in front of him, but the wind is picking up and he needs to be home.

+8+

The trips get easier after that. Dave moves quickly, clears out the first store and moves on down the street. He never sticks in one place very long, he feels eyes on him from the trees and the spaces between the houses.

The corpses, he resolutely does not notice, look more chewed every time he sees them.

He's going stir-crazy in his apartment, has taken to counting the days with marks on the walls. It's been four weeks since Rose left. Bro still isn't home. _Just another minute_ , he thinks, _just another hour, just another day_. He tries not to imagine that someone's knocking on the door.

+8+

The gunshot is so unexpected Dave drops his backpack. It hits the ground with a muffled thump, but he's too busy trying to breathe to panic about the noise.

The gunshot repeats itself, closer. Dave runs to the window and peers out into the night. The gun fires a third time, then a fourth. The moon is full, bright enough for Dave to see everything.

A boy runs around the corner, and he's the first human being Dave's seen in so long that he thinks he might cry. He's faced backwards, pointing a gun down the street, and he looks filthy.

The first corpse shambles around the corner and Dave thinks he really _will_ cry.

It's a tattered, rotten thing, face a mess of teeth and maggots, stomach distended, joints bending the wrong way. It's not making a sound except the wet noise of dead tissue moving when it shouldn't. It's not moving fast, but it's got a sense of inexorability to it. _It won't ever stop_ , Dave thinks dreamily.

The boy stops in the street, aims, and shoots the thing in the head. It topples with the suddenness of a puppet with cut strings, but there's another corpse rounding the corner, and another. The boy curses and fires again.

He misses.

He's fumbling in his waistband, Dave sees another gun, and he realizes that he won't be on time, the walking corpses are too close. He has to save this boy, he realizes, or watch him get ripped apart.

He's running down the street, sword out and shaking in his hand, before he's conscious of his decision. He knows the right stroke to take off the head – his crazy Bro teaching him on the roof, Jesus Christ where could Bro be – and he takes it perfectly.

The boy is shouting with surprise behind him, the gun swinging wildly, but Dave is in a space of terror and adrenaline and the corpse topples away from him. There are two more, and one of them he thinks he recognizes from school. Some kid from sophomore year, before.

He's going to throw up later, and probably cry, but in the moment he takes the next blow and prays that he doesn't get shot.

The next shambling corpse drops with the sound of a gunshot and Dave stops with the sword by his side, panting.

“Holy shit,” the boy says. His voice is cracked and rusty like Dave knows his voice will be, from disuse. There never seemed to be much point in talking to the echoes in the emptiness of the town.

Dave leans over and throws up. The boy keeps him upright. His hand on Dave's shoulder can't stop moving, like Dave is the first human he's met in too long.

“I'm Dave,” he says, voice a hoarse croak when he's able to stand up. He's got his hand on the other boy's bare arm and he can't remember moving it, but the skin-to-skin contact feels so good he can't stop himself.

“Karkat,” the boy replies. He's got brown eyes and he's shaking and Dave's kissing him before he quite understands what's happening.

Karkat clutches his shoulders and kisses back like they're the last two people on earth.


	2. if what's loosed on earth will be loosed up on high it's a hell of a heaven we must go to when we die

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song Thin Blue Flame by Josh Ritter
> 
> Opening quote from the song Safe and Sound by Taylor Swift

  
_I remember tears streaming down your face_   
_When I said, I'll never let you go_   
_When all those shadows almost killed your light_   
_I remember you said, don't leave me here alone_   
_But all that's dead and gone and passed tonight_

+8+

They get back to Dave's apartment quickly like only two people with razors of fear in their guts can, clutching hands whenever they hear a noise. 

He sees another corpse, a few blocks away, moving slowly in the direction of the shopping district. He doesn’t tell Karkat, just moves them faster and faster. His mouth tastes sour with vomit and fear. Karkat's hadn't been much better. 

_Home,_ he thinks incoherently. Bro isn't there but Dave's almost stopped looking. 

+8+

Karkat breaks the mirror in the entryway with a stiff punch as soon as the door is closed. He moves on like nothing out of the ordinary had happened at all. 

Dave thinks that maybe Karkat isn't quite sane, is cracked through with trauma and fear in a way his quiet, constant panic hasn't managed yet. _Fuck it_ , he thinks fiercely, _the world's shit anyway_.

Dave kisses Karkat on the bed because it feels good, it feels like safety used to. Karkat kisses back like he's got minutes to live. Like he thinks he's got to make it count. It tastes disgusting because apparently neither of them wastes water to brush teeth, because Dave puked over the corpse of one of his classmates, because Karkat had puked somewhere on Elm Street for no reason at all. It feels so good Dave almost forgets that the world is ending. 

“Did you have someone else?” Karkat asks after an hour of touching just to make sure, _just to make double sure, just to make triple sure that he isn't alone_. Dave shrugs. 

“She was evacuated, her mother was military,” he whispers, then pauses for a long time. “I think I love her.” He laughs even though it's not funny. 

Karkat nods into his shoulder. 

“I have someone too.” His breathing hitches and he makes a noise that could be a sob, could be hysterical laughter. “Fuck, had, Jesus Christ, I think he's dead.” 

Dave clutches him because he thinks he might go crazy too. Two crazy people in their birds-nest apartment, watching the world eat itself. 

“Who was he?” he asks in a whisper. _Draining the poison out of the wound_ , he theorizes. Karkat makes the noise again into his shoulder, but pulls his face away enough to take a breath. 

“Craziest motherfucker God ever saw fit to curse his good earth with.” He wipes his nose with a disgusting sleeve. “Stoned all the time. Probably a good thing, he was a violent fuck when he was sober. Said the most goddamn disturbing shit. Liked to bake pies in my kitchen, I don't even fucking get it.” Karkat's definitely laughing now, and it sounds awful, like he's tearing the sounds out of his chest. “I loved the stupid fuck.” 

“Her name's Rose,” Dave says, because that's all he can offer. 

“Gamzee. Don't know what the fuck his parents were thinking.” Karkat rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. 

Dave nods and rubs his back, as much reassurance as he can reliably give. 

+8+

He's shaken awake in the darkest part of the night, about two in the morning, the entire world silent. Karkat's gasping in his ear, face a mess of tears. 

“Do you think everyone's dead in the whole world?” he asks desperately. 

“No, no, there's Rose, fucking-,” Dave says, sleep making everything dizzy and impossible to grasp. Karkat collapses onto his chest with a sob. 

“Rose,” he echoes, and it sounds like a prayer. Dave wraps his arms around him and clings because fuck, _Rose_ , he misses her so much he thinks he might die. Karkat clings back and Dave goes back to sleep wondering what it was like to be in love with someone you _knew_ was dead. 

+8+

Dave asks what it's like outside the borders of the town, past the spaces between the houses and the trees, swaying even when the breeze isn't blowing. Beyond the empty – fuck you, Bro, fuck you – and ever-smaller space between the apartment's four walls. 

Karkat tells him. 

Karkat tells him about subway systems so full of the dead that you could sail a boat on a sea of their rancid, writhing meat. He talks about buildings where people had been trapped and starved and eaten each other without a hint of the plague. He talks blankly, about death and more death until Dave can't hear any more and covers his ears with his hands, gasping for air. 

Karkat keeps talking, eyes empty, until his voice runs out and Dave shuts Karkat's mouth with his own just to get him to stop. 

Dave doesn't ask again. 

+8+

“Is this your brother?” Karkat asks once. It's getting colder outside, it's getting harder to find food. The stores ran out a while ago. The homes they break into are empty, mostly, except for the shambling ones that didn't leave soon enough. 

He's holding one of their ironic Christmas pictures in his hand. Bro's wearing a Christmas hat over his cap. 

Dave walks out the door and comes back at midnight with cans of soup in both hands. Karkat's broken every mirror in every apartment in the building, his hands bloody messes and the doors in the stairwells splintered and broken. They gape like mouths, he thinks, then dismisses the thought because it doesn't help to think of teeth. 

He doesn't know how Karkat broke them down, tries not to think of him throwing himself against them mindlessly. Again and again and again. 

+8+

Dave asks where Karkat's from because neither of them sleep well at night, Dave always dreams that someone's knocking on the door. The nights are dark and with nothing but the dead outside, so silent. 

“Asheville,” Karkat says, his voice empty like when he talks about death. “North Carolina.”

Dave doesn't say anything after that, because he knows from before the power went out, before he stopped turning his television on, the East Coast was the worst. Karkat breathes into his neck for a while and Dave almost thinks he's found a way to sleep before he stirs, pulls away to stare into the darkness. 

Karkat would stare down the abyss until it blinked because he didn't know how to do anything else. 

He was trapped on an elevator for two days, he says, the door jammed shut and the dead pounding on the other side and not making a sound except the impact of necrotic flesh on metal. Two days of staring at his reflection until he couldn't meet his own eyes and broke the mirrors. 

Two days of thinking he would die and rot in a four-by-six foot space, surrounded by fragments of his own reflection like a constellation of utter failure. _Gamzee_ , he would think, _I'll see Gamzee soon_ , because surely Gamzee would be dead by now. Not sleeping until he thinks the dead outside are all Gamzee, come to kill him and take him home. 

He goes crazy, he says blankly, until the darkness and the smell didn't matter. 

Two days until some fuck a floor up decided to try to run and the horde left for fresh meat. _Lucky_ , Karkat says with a voice thinner and more arid than desert air, _that I was lucid enough to take the chance, to make the break for it_. 

Dave holds him while he shakes out tearless sobs. He doesn't dream, that night, about anything at all. 

+8+

“What month is it?” Karkat asks one day. He's rolled up in the comforters they'd salvaged days and weeks ago. It's so cold, there's snow on the ground and the corpses have frozen still mostly, the rest sluggish and so weak. It's safer than ever except Dave thinks that death is creeping over them in hunger and sluggish limbs. 

“Must be November, December. Shit man, I don't know.” He hasn't had to know the date in days, weeks, months. 

“I'm leaving, soon,” Karkat says. Dave stumbles to the window and throws up out of it, into the cold. There are eyes watching from the trees and the snowy places between the houses. When he's empty and he can feel the fear like the snow is settling on his skin, he slides down the wall and curls up on the floor. 

Karkat watches him from the blanket pile with brown marbles for eyes. 

+8+

“You're going to starve here,” Karkat says conversationally. Dave shivers and packs the last can of peaches into his bag. There's snow drifted on the floor from the broken windows and frost on the cans, but a week or so ago Karkat found them gloves in a house abandoned just like this. 

“Probably.” He shrugs and moves into the next room. There's a corpse frozen to the floor, a child, and Dave doesn't even know if it's the kind that moves. They look the same under the snow. 

He stands and watches it for a while. Karkat rests his forehead between Dave's shoulder-blades and breathes. 

“You can come with me. It's a thing you're allowed to do,” he whispers when the shivers have started getting convulsive. 

Dave's ribs expand for the first time in, he thinks, weeks or months or years. 

He thinks about Bro and how his Bro isn't home still and it's been months. He thinks about Rose, gorgeous powerful Rose, and how she promised she'd come back for him, and how he loves her so much it feels like it's eating his insides. He starts crying in the middle of a stranger’s abandoned house with a child's corpse watching him from the floor. 

There are eyes watching him from the windows, inquisitive eyes, though even the dead have stopped moving. He dreams about knocks on the door, every night. 

“They said they would come back,” he sobs. Karkat nods into his shoulder. 

“He said that too,” he says and he sounds like his whole body is creaking under the weight of the bitterness. Dave gropes behind him until he catches Karkat's hand and clutches it, clutches it tight like he's drowning. He cries himself out as silently as he's able. 

“Come with me,” Karkat mutters. His teeth are clicking together – they're going to regret this, Dave knows, going to regret staying out in the cold – and his hand is twitching. It's the only time he'll offer, Dave knows that too. 

_Rose_ , he thinks, and _Bro_. 

“Yeah, okay,” he mutters. His voice cracks.


	3. i got a girl in the war and if they can't find a way to help her they can go to hell

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from the song Girl in the War by Josh Ritter
> 
> Opening quote from the song Safe and Sound by Taylor Swift

  
_Just close your eyes_  
_The sun is going down_  
_You'll be alright_  
_No one can hurt you now_  
_Come morning light_  
_You and I'll be safe and sound_

+8+

Karkat is restless, goes out for long hours and comes back with split knuckles. Sometimes Dave wonders if he's hitting mirrors or walls or frozen corpses, always decides it doesn't matter. The winter drags on. Dave pretends it isn't a race between the food and the cold. They can't leave with the snow on the ground, though it'd be safer. 

They wouldn't die of the dead but they would die all the same, freezing to death. 

Dave leaves the apartment less and less, lets Karkat find the food and the blankets. He stares out the windows, tries to meet the inquisitive eyes. The stairs are too high for him to climb back up if he goes down, he thinks, too lined with mouths that will kill him with a bite. 

_Bro warned me about the stairs_ , he thinks one day by accident, and then doesn't think anything at all for a long time, until Karkat comes back and shakes him awake. He was dreaming that there was a knock on the door. 

He doesn't try not to think about Bro, doesn't try not to think about Rose. They just matter less and less, as it gets colder. 

+8+

Dave goes to the roof for the first time in months. There's a corpse there, the kind that moves, and it's not quite frozen. Dave slices off it's head and doesn't feel anything at all. 

It isn't blonde, he notes, and goes back down to their apartment. When Karkat gets back he finds Dave curled up in the corner, watching the windows blankly. 

“Come on,” Karkat says, and drags him to bed. He kisses feeling back into Dave's fingertips, cursing quietly, _Dave you fucking moron, you're such a goddamn idiot_ , kisses him until he's not thinking at all. 

+8+

“Rose will give up when she comes back and I'm gone,” Dave says. 

Karkat's shivering and Dave's wrapped around him like an extra layer. He'd come back later than ever, bruised and shaking with cold. Dave had almost asked but he thinks about being trapped in elevators and that maybe Karkat just wants to know that he isn't going to die and rot, staring himself in the eyes. 

“She won't ever give up,” Karkat answers through chattering teeth. He sounds so sure that for a moment Dave can't _not_ believe him. He wants to, he aches to. 

“They said they'd come back,” he murmurs into Karkat's shoulder, and can't even tell if it was an accusation or a prayer. 

+8+

”Where are we going,” Dave asks one night when the snow is falling and turning the silence into an entity in the room. Karkat shrugs and says it doesn't matter. 

”As long as we've got food,” he says, and doesn't finish the thought. 

“We're going west,” Karkat says later. Dave remembers elevators, wonders if Karkat's running from corpses named Gamzee. He doesn't ask, but he doesn't argue either. 

“I always wanted to see the Hollywood sign,” he says instead. The silence circles and circles, but he sleeps and dreams about trees instead of doors, swaying in a breeze that's not there. 

+8+

The spring comes with rain and the slow slog of the dead. Dave watches them out the window because Karkat was smart enough to store food in the apartment for this. Karkat drops rocks on their heads even though it doesn't kill them, just because he can. It's almost okay again. 

“What do you miss?” Karkat asks one day. Dave glances around the apartment at the piles of cans and the broken mirror frame, the pile of blankets on the bed that smells like unwashed human. It smells like them. 

He glances at the pictures on the walls of him and his Bro, thinks about Rose. The thoughts are old thoughts, and scarred over. They don't hurt unless he presses. 

“Apple juice,” he decides, and goes back to watching the world drown itself. 

+8+

The rains fall for another month. Dave leaves the apartment to kill the corpses before they start wandering up the stairs. They aren't recognizable anymore, sometimes they don't even look human. It's easier but the spaces between the houses are staring again, the trees are always swaying. 

Karkat says most of the houses have been cleared out. 

“People don't goddamn prepare,” he says irately. Dave smiles for the first time in, he thinks, weeks and months. The rain keeps falling but the snow is gone, it's getting warmer again. _We'll leave soon_ , he thinks. 

“Get us some goddamn camping gear,” he tells Karkat. 

+8+

They have to lose some of the blankets after a while because it's getting so warm. Karkat sleeps better, Dave notices, and doesn't begrudge it. _We should head south_ , he thinks. Somewhere warm where blankets aren't needed so much. 

He doesn't think he'll ever sleep well again but maybe when there are no doors, he'll stop dreaming that someone's knocking on them. 

+8+

“We might find other survivors,” Dave says. They're packing, though it's not time to leave yet. The hours when the rain isn't falling are getting longer, and they're leaving as soon as they can. 

“You're the first one I met in two hundred miles,” Karkat says, offhand. Dave stops, gets up, leaves a pile of ramen on the floor. He curls up in the corner of the bathroom farthest from the door and stares at it, thinks of eyes watching him from the windows and the spaces between the houses. He feels isolation on his skin like the dirt that never washes off. 

Karkat settles against the door and starts packing again, silent except for wrappers crinkling. He's a shadow in the only light, the strip coming under the door. Dave watches it until he falls asleep, wakes from the dream of knocking on doors to find that he's been moved to the bed. Karkat's leaning against the wall beside him. 

He's watching the rain run down the windows. 

“They better not be assholes, that's all I've got to say,” Karkat says when he glances over and sees that Dave's awake. He looks almost sane, the bruises under his eyes almost gone. His knuckles are scabbed over. 

Dave kisses him because it's the same thing as an apology. 

+8+

“It's time to go,” Karkat says one day, standing at the door to the apartment. Dave thinks it's April. The date's slipped away in an era of living alone in a dying world, an eon living in a dead world with a broken, crazy boy. 

The rain has held off for three days. Enough time, Dave has decided, to get to the next town over. 

“Yeah, okay,” he says. His voice is rusty. 

“You have everything you need?” Karkat looks out the window as he says it, measuring the clouds or giving Dave space. It doesn't matter. 

Dave's got food in his pack, and water-bottles. Blankets, an extra set of pants, a roll of duct tape. At the very bottom there's a set of pictures. One of him and Bro, looking stiff and stupid in ironic reindeer outfits. One of him and Rose, junior prom, done up to the fucking nines. A Polaroid of Karkat taken with an abandoned camera. 

“Yeah, I got everything,” he says and shrugs on his backpack. 

He closes the door to the apartment for the last time – Bro, Bro, goodbye Bro – and makes his way past the open-mouthed doors lining the stairs. 

“Do you trust me?” Karkat asks. Dave stares at him, and how the light from the door to the world outside gives him a halo. He looks biblical and fierce, beautiful and fearful in a way that Dave thinks he's seen in paintings of angels. 

“Yeah.” he says hoarsely. Karkat grabs his hand imperiously and sets out down the street. There's not a corpse in sight. Just rows of ruined, empty houses. It's peaceful. 

_You don't get to_ like _people at the end of the world_ , Dave thinks, _you don't get to_ care _for them, you just love them until you die_. 

He also thinks _Bro_ , and _Rose_. 

They're half a mile down the highway before he's sure of himself again, out of sight of the windows and the spaces between the houses. There are no doors for the dreams to knock on. The trees that never stop moving are around them on all sides, and the dead don't follow them. 

“Hey Karkat,” he says, because the end of the world also doesn't leave room for lies. 

“The fuck you want?” Karkat replies, hand tightening around his. 

“I think I love you.” 

“Yeah, I knew that.” Karkat waits for a moment, a handful of steps, a few feet further out of hell. “I guess I love you too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Homestuck people and their fates:**  
> 
>  
> 
> Rose and her mother: safe in military compound, believe Dave to be dead
> 
> John and his dad: civilian evacuation to safe zone in Canada, currently farmers
> 
> Jade and Bec: Hanging out on island, no idea why the internet went down
> 
> Aradia and Sollux: Starved to death in apartment together, Tulsa
> 
> Tavros: Died saving a group of survivors in Montana
> 
> Nepeta and Equius: Crazy survivalist duo in Alabama bayou
> 
> Kanaya: Fourth person infected with the plague ever, still at large
> 
> Terezi and Vriska: Badasses in Mexico, saved entire town nearly single-handedly
> 
> Gamzee: Dead in North Carolina
> 
> Eridan and Feferi: Running a cruise-ship as a refugee camp, periodicaly taunts the military over the radio about their inadequacies 
> 
> Mrs. Paint and Spades Slick: Set up in a cozy mountain cabin, occasional zombie murder spree
> 
> Bro: Still alive, trying to get to Dave


End file.
